Section Overview |
During the 20th century, |
European politics and diplomacy in the 20th century were defined by total war and its consequences. World War I destroyed the balance of power, and the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, created unstable conditions in which extremist ideologies emerged that challenged liberal democracy and the postwar settlement. In Russia, hardships during World War I gave rise to a revolution in 1917.
The newly established, postwar democracies in central and eastern Europe were too weak to provide stability either internally or in the European state system, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The League of Nations, established after the war to employ collective security in the interests of peace, could not manage the international tensions unleashed by World War I. The breakdown of the settlement led to World War II, a conflict even more violent than World War I.
During this second great war, the combatants engaged in wholesale destruction of cities, deliberate attacks on civilians, and the systematic destruction of their enemies’ industrial complexes. The Nazi government in Germany undertook the annihilation of Jews from the whole continent (the Holocaust), as well as the murder of other targeted groups of Europeans. At the end of the war, the economic and political devastation left a power vacuum that facilitated the Cold War division of Europe.
During the 20th century, European imperialism, power, and sense of superiority reached both its apogee and nadir. In the first half of the century, nations extended their control and influence over most of the non-Western world, often through League of Nations’ mandates. The idea of decolonization was born early in the century with the formation of movements seeking rights for indigenous peoples; the material and moral destruction of World War II made the idea a reality. After the war, regions colonized and dominated by European nations moved from resistance to independence at differing rates and with differing consequences. Yet even after decolonization, neo-colonial dependency persisted, and millions of people migrated to Europe as its economy recovered from the war. This immigration created large populations of poor and isolated minorities, which occasionally rioted because of discrimination and economic deprivation. As European governments tried to solve these problems, the apparently permanent presence of the immigrants challenged old notions of European identity.
The uneasy alliance between Soviet Russia and the West during World War II gave way after 1945 to a diplomatic, political, and economic confrontation between the democratic, capitalist states of Western Europe allied with the United States and the communist bloc of Eastern Europe dominated by the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, relations between the two blocs fluctuated, but one consequence of the conflict was that European nations could not act autonomously in international affairs; the superpowers— the Soviet Union and the United States—controlled international relations in Europe.
Nonetheless, the Cold War promoted political and economic unity in Western Europe, leading to the establishment of a succession of ever-more comprehensive organizations for economic cooperation. In 1957, six countries formed the Common Market, which soon began to expand its membership to include other European states. The success of the Common Market inspired Europeans to work toward a closer political and economic unity, including a European executive body and Parliament. The founding of the European Union in 1991 at Maastricht included the agreement to establish the euro as a common currency for qualifying member states.
Following a series of largely peaceful revolutions in 1989, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe moved toward democracy and capitalist economies, and over time some of these states joined the European Union. One unforeseen consequence of the end of the Cold War was the re-emergence of nationalist movements within states, which led to the Balkan wars in Yugoslavia and tensions among the successor states of the Soviet Union as well as the rebirth of nationalist political parties in Western Europe.
Source: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-european-history-course-and-exam-description.pdf
The newly established, postwar democracies in central and eastern Europe were too weak to provide stability either internally or in the European state system, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The League of Nations, established after the war to employ collective security in the interests of peace, could not manage the international tensions unleashed by World War I. The breakdown of the settlement led to World War II, a conflict even more violent than World War I.
During this second great war, the combatants engaged in wholesale destruction of cities, deliberate attacks on civilians, and the systematic destruction of their enemies’ industrial complexes. The Nazi government in Germany undertook the annihilation of Jews from the whole continent (the Holocaust), as well as the murder of other targeted groups of Europeans. At the end of the war, the economic and political devastation left a power vacuum that facilitated the Cold War division of Europe.
During the 20th century, European imperialism, power, and sense of superiority reached both its apogee and nadir. In the first half of the century, nations extended their control and influence over most of the non-Western world, often through League of Nations’ mandates. The idea of decolonization was born early in the century with the formation of movements seeking rights for indigenous peoples; the material and moral destruction of World War II made the idea a reality. After the war, regions colonized and dominated by European nations moved from resistance to independence at differing rates and with differing consequences. Yet even after decolonization, neo-colonial dependency persisted, and millions of people migrated to Europe as its economy recovered from the war. This immigration created large populations of poor and isolated minorities, which occasionally rioted because of discrimination and economic deprivation. As European governments tried to solve these problems, the apparently permanent presence of the immigrants challenged old notions of European identity.
The uneasy alliance between Soviet Russia and the West during World War II gave way after 1945 to a diplomatic, political, and economic confrontation between the democratic, capitalist states of Western Europe allied with the United States and the communist bloc of Eastern Europe dominated by the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, relations between the two blocs fluctuated, but one consequence of the conflict was that European nations could not act autonomously in international affairs; the superpowers— the Soviet Union and the United States—controlled international relations in Europe.
Nonetheless, the Cold War promoted political and economic unity in Western Europe, leading to the establishment of a succession of ever-more comprehensive organizations for economic cooperation. In 1957, six countries formed the Common Market, which soon began to expand its membership to include other European states. The success of the Common Market inspired Europeans to work toward a closer political and economic unity, including a European executive body and Parliament. The founding of the European Union in 1991 at Maastricht included the agreement to establish the euro as a common currency for qualifying member states.
Following a series of largely peaceful revolutions in 1989, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe moved toward democracy and capitalist economies, and over time some of these states joined the European Union. One unforeseen consequence of the end of the Cold War was the re-emergence of nationalist movements within states, which led to the Balkan wars in Yugoslavia and tensions among the successor states of the Soviet Union as well as the rebirth of nationalist political parties in Western Europe.
Source: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-european-history-course-and-exam-description.pdf
The First World War
German Kaiser Wilhelm II's aggressive Weltpolitik foreign policy unnerved other Great Powers causing Britain and France to draw closer together after the Moroccan Crises.
|
The Schlieffen Plan called for Germany to violate Belgium's neutrality and sweep through its coastal plains into northern France. This drew Britain into the Great War while atrocities reported during the Rape of Belgium further vilified Germany in the court of international opinion.
|
The heroic French defense at the First Battle of the Marne halted the German advance. Fighting along the Western Front quickly bogged down in horrific trench warfare as Germany was forced to divide its forces in a protracted two-front war.
|
Lord Kitchener, the popular Secretary of State for War, encourages British men to enlist in this well-known propaganda poster.
1915-1916
|
|
1917-1918
|
Russia surrendered in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk following the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution allowing Germany to turn its full might against the Western Front during the 1918 Spring Offensive. Failing to breakthrough, the Germans fell back to the defensive Hindenburg Line as the Allies, fresh with American reinforcements, went on the Hundred Days Offensive. By November, the Germans were exhausted and asked for an Armistice after the German Revolution overthrew the Kaiser.
|
|
When the fighting ended, the stab-in-the-back myth emerged among German right-wing militants, a dangerous narrative that the German armed forces were not defeated in the field but were betrayed by communists, socialists, and Jews at home - the so-called "November criminals."
Peace Conferences
German and Italian Expansion
|
|
The Second World War
1939-1940
|
In Spring 1940, Germany did an end-run around the French Maginot Line, a complex network of underground fortresses developed after World War I. British forces fell back across the English Channel at Dunkirk.
When France fell in June 1940, General Charles de Gaulle rallied Free French Forces to his government-in-exile in London, proclaiming that France had lost the battle but not the war.
|
By July 1940, the United Kingdom stood alone against the Axis Powers. For months, the Royal Air Force fought the Luftwaffe in the skies during the Battle of Britain as London suffered through the Blitz.
1941-1942
|
|
The first great turning point of the war was British General Bernard "Monty" Montgomery's defeat of German General Erwin Rommel's Africa Corps at the Battle of El Alamein, Egypt in October 1942. After driving Axis forces from Africa, Allied forces launched an invasion of Italy in 1943.
The major turning point of the war was the Soviet defeat of German forces at the Battle of Stalingrad during the winter of 1942-1943.
The Cold War
1940s-1956
|
Stalin broke his promise to allow free elections in Eastern Europe leading to a breakdown of relations with Britain and the USA. By 1946, Winston Churchill announced that an "Iron Curtain" had descended across Europe.
|
The Space Race began with the Soviet launch of Sputnik I in 1957. Four years later, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.
Soviet-American relations reached their low point after the frosty Vienna Summit in 1961. The next year the two superpowers narrowly avoid nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
|
While Soviet forces were welcomed as liberators at the end of WWII, they had become the oppressors by the 1968 Prague Spring.
|
After the United States lost the Vietnam War, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and American president Richard Nixon inaugurated a relatively peaceful era of détente in the mid-1970s.
|
1980-1991
|
In an effort to revive the stagnating USSR, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the Perestroika and Glasnost reform movements. These backfired though, and probably hastened the Soviet Union's collapse.
With Gorbachev announcing the Soviet Union would no longer use the force of the Brezhnev Doctrine to prop up Warsaw Pact regimes, 1989 saw a rapid collapse of communist rule, including the East German opening of the Berlin Wall, the peaceful Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution, and the violent overthrow of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.
|
When hardline Soviet Communist hardliners attempted a coup against the reforming Gorbachev in 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin led a dramatic, defiant resistance in Moscow and the coup failed. With fear of communist rule gone, the USSR had officially dissolved by December.
European Union
|
Russia and Soviet Successor States
|
|
Separatist Movements
National minorities have continued to fight for independent states, such as the Basque National Liberation Movement (ETA) of Spain, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the United Kingdom.
|
The Irish Troubles came to a negotiated end with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, but were followed by the terrible Omagh bombing carried out by elements of the Real Irish Republican Army who were unhappy with the peace deal.
Wars of Former Yugoslavia
When communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, old national rivalries erupted, especially in Yugoslavia which dissolved in ethnic conflicts. Serbs, led by Slobodan Milosevic, carried out atrocities against Croats and Muslims during the Bosnian Genocide and Kosovo War.
|
Decolonization
|
The breakup of the British Empire began with the 1947 Partition of India and ended with the return of Hong Kong to China 50 years later. Dozens of colonies became independent states in the interim.
|